What with today being Father’s Day and everything, I got a present from my daughter – Super Mario Galaxy 2! Although she seemed to want to keep it for herself and kept running off with it.

When I tried to play it, however, things went wrong. As is always the case with Wii games now, I install them to my USB hard drive and run them from there. So I opened up the USB Loader and put the disc in. Nothing. Ejected the disc and tried again. Nothing. Tried a different USB Loader – and nothing. Even GeckOS failed to see the disc.

Thinking the disc might be knackered, I tried it just straight in the disc channel, where it told me the disc was a “Wii System Update”. Odd, I thought, since I already had v4.2 of the Wii firmware – the newest available.

I searched online, and found (variously) that there is no update on the Super Mario Galaxy 2 disc, that there is and it does nothing, and there is but it is optional. Everywhere seemed to suggest that it doesn’t do anything to installed homebrew and any cIOSes you’ve installed on your Wii.

THIS IS NOT TRUE.

Following this information, I backed up my NAND (with BootMii), removed my SD card (as a precaution) and ran the SMG2 update. And this wiped my cIOSes preventing USB Loaders from working (and BootMii from running, meaning I couldn’t restore my NAND). Rubbish.

Thankfully, remodding wasn’t a problem (just a pain and a bit time consuming) – I just followed the excellent NeoGAF guide. Afterwards, sadly, SMG2 prompted me to update again. Gah!

Luckily now USB Loader recognised my disc, installed the game, and it ran fine. I think I’d installed newer cIOS files with the remod, which may have helped it see the disc, perhaps? Why my Wii still wants to update is a mystery though.